June 30, 2012

Representatives of international and civil society organizations today agreed to promote major investments in water and sanitation infrastructure in Haiti and the Dominican Republic as the long-term solution to the cholera epidemic in those countries.

This support was welcomed by Haiti’s Minister of Health, Dr. Florence Duperval Guillaume, and the ambassadors of the Dominican Republic and Haiti to the Organization of American States (OAS) during the launch of the new Regional Coalition on Water and Sanitation for the Elimination of Cholera in the Island of Hispaniola.

The coalition’s objective is to support the two governments in harmonizing and streamlining international support for investments in water and sanitation infrastructure to eliminate cholera from the island.

The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), the National Health Foundation of Brazil (FUNASA), the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and the Haitian Association of Medical Physicians Abroad, joined the coalition and in urging governments, society, and international agencies to support this initiative for improving access to clean drinking water and sanitation in Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

The Pan American Health Organization/World Health Organization (PAHO/WHO), the OAS, CARICOM, UNICEF, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID), the World Bank, and the Inter-American Association of Sanitary and Environmental Engineering (AIDIS) are the other members of the Regional Coalition.

Shorter version: A whole bunch of health bureaucracies think it would be neat if the US and UN would cough up some money so Haitians can drink clean water and defecate without spreading cholera. "Urging" is not the same as demanding.

This is also one of the few cholera stories out of Haiti that actually mentions the health minister, who has kept a low profile while the disease has entrenched itself as just another miserable fact of Haitian life.

Here it is June 30, and the BC coast has been cool, cloudy and wet since forever—especially on Malcolm Island, where we just spent a cool, cloudy and wet nine days. But I'd rather be here than in the eastern US. Via The New York Times: Storms Leave 3 Million Without Power. Excerpt:

More than three million people in nine states woke up on Saturday morning without power. But after the storms dissipated on Saturday, the heat set in. Temperatures soared into the triple digits in some places. With utility crews struggling, people across the mid-Atlantic faced the prospect of days without electricity.

“You could draw a line from Denver to St. Louis to Washington, D.C. All those areas are in the hundreds right now,” said Daniel Porter, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, saying the heat was hurting the recovery effort.

Some sought refuge in movie theaters, coffee shops and malls. On Saturday afternoon, Montgomery Mall in Bethesda, Md., was jammed with people seeking air-conditioning and working lights. Dozens camped out on the floor, with laptops, iPads and cellphones plugged into sockets on the walls.

President Obama telephoned the governors of Ohio, West Virginia, Maryland and Virginia, all of whom declared states of emergency. Gov. Bob McDonnell of Virginia said his state had suffered the largest “non-hurricane power outage” in its history.

“This will be a multiday restoration effort,” the governor said on his Twitter feed Saturday afternoon, “very much like a hurricane restoration.”

All across the region, people tried to cope. The men’s shelter in northeast Washington where William Burrell was staying lost power and hadn’t regained it by Saturday morning.

“The fans, the air-conditioning, all of it. It was burning up,” he said. “So they opened the doors to try to get some air to circulate through, but by that time the thunderstorm had stopped, and there was the littlest, light breeze, but it wasn’t enough to cool everybody off that was in there.”

Julie B. Rubenstein, a lawyer who lives in Northern Virginia, said that after suffering through the night with no power and no air-conditioning, she sought refuge in her office. She described how friends who rushed to grocery stores to get bags of ice found only long lines and limited supplies. At one point, she said, a “near-fight” broke out over a bag of ice.

“It is great that I had an office I could go to,” she said, “but so many people don’t.”

In Virginia, authorities opened 90 air-conditioned shelters where residents could go to escape the heat.

Around one million birds have died or were culled at 111 poultry farms and 15 farms in Jalisco, Mexico, where the National Health and Quality Agribusiness Service (Senasica) detected in ten such facilities the AH7N3 strain of avian flu.

The Senasica said it issued license to import a vaccine from Asia to be distributed at the disease-hit states where the birds are being buried with due prophylaxis (quarantine, cull and vaccination) to contain the spread and get rid of the virus.

FAO also issued a call to check the outbreak since the bird flu virus is very aggressive, adding that its presence now enters Mexico in the WHO watch list though Mexican authorities claim the strain is not a threat to human poultry consumption.

And with this post I'm on the road again, this time for home. Posting will resume tonight.

The World Health Organization (WHO) and the US-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have been unable to solve the mystery of the fatal skin disease plaguing the central province of Quang Ngai.

According to a press release issued by WHO and Vietnam’s Ministry of Health on Thursday, early this month two experts from WHO and the CDC were invited to help local agencies identify the disease that has affected 216 people and caused 12 deaths in Ba To District since April of last year.

However, the cause of the disease, referred to as inflammatory palmoplantar hyperkeratosis (IPPH) syndrome by WHO, is still unknown.

“We do not know what causes the syndrome, or its source of transmission, identifying the cause may take longer than anticipated or prove elusive,” the press release quoted WHO representative for Vietnam, Dr. Takeshi Kasai, as saying.

So far it has been confirmed that the syndrome is characterized by a chronic intoxication that can lead to inflammation and lesions of the hands, feet and liver.

Several field investigations conducted by the health ministry have established that the syndrome may not be infectious in origin and that most patients suffered from inflammation of liver, according to the press release.

Other results included the discovery of Aflatoxins - a fungus that contaminates grains before harvest or during storage – in few rice samples, and no presence of elevated levels of heavy metals or agrochemicals taken from human or environmental samples, it said.

The health ministry will continue focusing its efforts in treating current patients and monitoring new cases as they occur. Meanwhile, further investigations will be conducted to measure and evaluate the effectiveness of interventions as well as to identify other risk factors associated with IPPH syndrome, the press release said.

Even as a worried Uttar Pradesh government is combating the outbreak of encephalitis that has claimed 117 lives in the last one month in the eastern part of the state, the Gorakhpur administration is toying with homeopathy and fish to take on the killer disease.

According to highly-placed sources, a 'hate-ke' (different) proposal came from the divisional commissioner of Gorakhpur Ravindra Naik, who has sent in a detailed proposal, pitching for introduction of homeopathic treatments in Acute Encephalitis Syndrome (AES, saying that once cleared by the health department, the initiative could be taken up in a phased manner.

Talking to IANS, Naik said that he had read about homeopathy's "successful battle" against encephalitis in some AES afflicted districts of Andhra Pradesh and was keen that UP should also take it up.

"These medicines are time tested and we plan to take it up intensively as it was done in the polio immunisation drive, door to door," said the divisional commissioner, adding that he hoped that the proposal would find favour with the state government.

Before sending the proposal to the Health Department a detailed study of the strains and conditions of the AES in the Gorakhpur division has also been done and the homeopathic experts have suggested that the disease could be "taken on" by "slow induction" of homeopathic medicines such as Baladona 100, 200 and Tuberculum.

The homoeopathy doctors contend that if not in combating the disease post-contraction, it could be used successfully in prevention "in a big way."

The AES, including the deadly Japanese Encephalitis (JE), had claimed more than 600 lives in the last season and has started peaking "pre-season" in areas around Gorakhpur division. Though no case of JE has been detected so far, AES deaths have been reported from Gorakhpur, Kushinagar, Deoria and Maharajganj.

Other than this the National Rural Health Mission (NHRM) has also sanctioned a budget of Rs.39 lakh to buy 'seeds' of the larvae gobbling Gambusia fish.

These fish, which eat up the mosquito larvae, will soon be imported by the UP Fisheries department from Odisha, West Bengal and Andhra Pradesh. Having been successfully used in Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh in the past, NHRM Mission director Mukesh Kumar Meshram says "it is a good bet" to take on the encephalitis menace.

The fish seeds would be bred in Fisheries Department tanks and then distributed to 20 districts like Basti, Gorakhpur, Gonda, Maharajganj and others.

The Mexican daily El Universal reports that bird flu has caused the deaths of some 870,000 poultry, whether from the disease or culling, in ten farms in the western Mexican state of Jalisco, Mexican authorities confirmed today. They said they have detected 1.7 million infected birds.

"The number of birds that have died from disease or culling as a measure of control and eradication is 870,000 as of today," said a news release from the National Service of Health, Safety, and Agroalimentary Quality, which did not specify the number of culled birds.

The agency of the Secretariat of Agriculture said it had detected 1.7 million infected birds, out of some 6,120,500 that were inspected in the health campaign carried out in the last few days in the Los Altos region of Jalisco.

The agency stated that it has launched the National Animal Health Emergency Campaign, in which it inspected 111 large poultry farms, of which 10 showed the presence of the virus, 7 more than in the first inspection.

PATNA: The Patna high court has taken strong exception to the death of over 100 children in the state due to acute encephalitis syndrome (AES) during the last one month.

A division bench comprising Justice T Meena Kumari and Justice Chakradhari Sharan Singh on Thursday rejected a report submitted by the government on the matter and directed the government to file within four weeks a fresh report listing the steps taken so far to check the disease.

A petition was filed in this connection by Dhirendra Kumar. The petition alleged lapses on the part of the government and the doctors in providing prompt treatment to the ailing children. The court was also informed the state government initiated a move to procure vaccines from the Centre after the death of many children.

Petitioner's lawyer Sunil Kumar informed the court that immunization was not done properly. Also, many doctors, deputed to Anugrah Narayan Magadh Medical College and Hospital, Gaya, either did not report for duty or went back after their deputation was cancelled.

Additional advocate general-3 Rai Shivajinath informed the court about the deputation of doctors, immunization of children and fogging in the affected areas.

"The reason for the increase in the number of cases is because the programme of fogging could not be carried out due to the floods and rain."

"During monsoons, people are more prone to diseases, but we are still continuing with the awareness programme. Though we plan to resume the fogging programme once the floods have reduced, we still can't say anything," he said.

The official said it is difficult to avoid these diseases every year because a lot of people are engaged in pig farming, which is another reason for the spread of the disease.

"The virus causing this disease is transmitted by culex mosquitoes, which is mostly found in piggeries and so we are sensitizing the people on how to keep their piggeries clean and free of mosquitoes," he said.

For the last few years, diseases like JE and AES have become quite common in the state and though programmes such as adult vaccination was introduced by the health department last year, it hasn't helped much.

After confirmation of the death of Jonathan Samuel Sarrias Pico, just 5 years old, last Wednesday, the Ministry of Health reports that during the 25 epidemiological weeks of the current year there have been 11,797 cases of dengue, of which 171 have been diagnosed as severe dengue (known previously as hemorrhagic dengue).

"During these 25 weeks five persons have died in the province of Guayas, nine in Manabí, one in Los Ríos, one in El Oro, one in Santa Elena, one in Pichincha and two in Santo Domingo de los Tsáchilas," the ministry said.

Measles and leptospirosis cases in Negros Occidental continue to remain higher this year compared to 2011, while dengue fever and typhoid cases have dropped, Provincial Health Office reports released yesterday, showed.

Measles cases in Negros Occidental from December 17, 2011 to June 28 this year were 244 compared to 11 last year, which is alarming, Dr. Ernell Tumimbang, provincial health officer, said.

Negros Occidental has the most number of measles cases in Western Visayas, he said.

To curb the increase in measles, outbreak response immunization campaigns are being implemented in affected areas, he said, noting that the bulk of those hit have been those aged 9 to 19 years old, who had not been covered by previous DOH immunization drives.

Those targeted for immunization in the age group affected are 9,000, Tumimbang said.

Meanwhile, Dr. Grace Tan of the Bacolod City Health Office said 39 cases of measles were recorded from January to June 16 this year, with a 7-month-old as lone fatality, compared to 33 cases for the whole of 2011.

LEPTOSPIROSIS

Leptospirosis cases in Negros Occidental are 14 percent higher this year compared to 2011, Tumimbang said. There have been 56 cases of leptospirosis and seven deaths recorded this year, compared to 49 cases and eight deaths in the same period in 2011, he said.